


saves a single soul

by MathildaHilda



Series: children of the machine [4]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alice is a precious bean, Because that probably happens when you're an android, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Gen, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 13:03:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15930998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: She who saves a single soul, saves the universe.-	Lewis Carroll***Freedom and love are just different words for different codes but they become the only codes she really care about.





	saves a single soul

She is a child born without a mother or a father. She is a child born inside a machine, put together by artificial arms and a faceless voice. She cries when she’s born, laughs on command and remains smiling and hapless until she is sold.

Her model is new and beautiful and disappears off the shelves in hours.

She holds her father’s hand and smiles, something resembling joy on her small face.

The seller calls her a perfect child and her father grunts a reply, pays and drags her out the door.

 

 

 

He calls her Alice, because that’s what _she_ was called. She doesn’t ask who _she_ is, but she suspects and later learns when she finds a picture in a drawer.

They call her a perfect child, but she doesn’t understand how she can be perfect if all her father sees is some machine mimicking responses to actions and questions his own child, _his real child_ , perhaps never would comprehend or even refuse to do.

 

 

 

Her new owner is her father and she sees him like that, but there is no love. She is built to recognize it, but she can’t sense it anywhere. The man named father in her programming is angry and sad and so unpredictable that all her protocols goes out the window.

She breaks free around the same time he buys another Android, tears streaming down her cheeks and her skin filling the pale patches. There are red shards spread across their home wherever she looks and the last one seems to disappear when her father returns.

She remembers the AX400s from the store she was placed in and she watches the beautiful woman in the white clothes and runs when she smiles at her. Her hands are numb from the pain but at least they don’t bleed.

 

 

 

The woman is named Kara, but overtime she forgets that. She reminds her time and time again, and after a while it feels a little more like she came up with the name rather than the humans.

 

 

 

Whenever her father breaks Kara, it’s always her fault. Kara falls down the stairs and crashes into walls and she can do nothing but watch and scream at her father. She falls too but he doesn’t break her.

Not yet.

He loves her, so why would he break her?

She is not designed to stop loving, but she’s not designed at all. Not anymore.

She watches with missing colors how he carries Kara away. When she comes back she’s just different enough for her to feel something new spread throughout her chest.

 

 

 

The new Kara teaches her that that’s what anger feels like.

He breaks that Kara too.

 

 

 

The last Kara, _her_ Kara, comes back after two weeks and she feels as if though she could cry. Her father has been calmer than most weeks, but if there’s something she’s learned through homework it is that there are storms that can come out of nowhere.

She suspects that that storm is on its way.

 

 

 

They escape through a window and a door and leave on a bus.

They don’t escape at all.

She dies with a frightened scream and her audio processor cuts out just as her father reaches the end of the steps. Kara dies free and imprisoned, frozen in fear and frozen by command.

Her father’s house has never been filled with so much blue. She wonders if the real Alice would’ve found it beautiful, that stark color against all the darkness of the home.

The gun is heavy in her hand when her father dies and her eyes are wide when Kara pulls the trigger.

They flee in the rain with soaked clothes and with her breath catching in her throat. She doesn’t need to breathe, but she shivers because the command is in effect and she can’t do anything to remove it.

She has tried so hard to be human, so that’s what she stays.

 

 

 

She falls asleep and wakes up to a different reality. She begs it to be a nightmare, but nightmares are beautiful compared to her reality. Kara is different, hair much shorter and her white clothes are missing. There’s no light by her head.

She remembers thinking that those Androids were the most beautiful ones in the whole store, and now all she can see is just how much that memory is true.

Black and blonde, brown and white.

 

 

 

She dies on a road because she is afraid of being alone. Because being alone means facing the dark by yourself and not even she is brave enough to muster through that.

The man behind them isn’t fast enough and isn’t strong enough and he dies then and there. Kara lives for a moment longer and then she’s gone too.

Alice and the old man by the fence are the only living people in the whole world.

Even if it’s only for a moment.

She runs back and she is a fawn caught in the headlights when the car crashes through her.

The man by the fence curses and sighs and blue blood streaks the road.

The man in the road doesn’t chase them and stays where he’s told to. They survive, even if it’s only for one more day.

 

The man in the suit and blinking light doesn’t find them and neither does the policemen. She embraces Kara in soaked clothes on an empty train and thinks that that it what having a mother feels like.

 

 

 

An Android told Kara where to go, so that’s where they go. She is afraid and pulls back but Kara is stubborn and she thinks rather petulantly that Kara is just another stupid Android.

But she feels love, so she stays.

 

Kara forgets and doesn’t and she is more scared than during any of the times her father shouted and threw things. She hides and cries until her mother finds her and then they run.

They die and they don’t in a house riddled with bullet holes and monsters in the basement.

Monsters that are not monsters emerges from the shadows of the night and the big man shoots his master. Either way, the bad man dies.

Luther comes with them.

They leave without him.

 

 

 

Kara learns what Alice looks like with a smile when they meet the Androids in the park. The smile feels odd and almost wrong until she decides to keep it.

It’s in the snow and cold and warm light of a carousel that she learns what family is.

 

 

 

They never stop running.

 

 

 

They don’t make it to Jericho.

They make it.

A part of her is afraid Kara will leave her if she tells her the truth.

Kara leaves when she learns. Kara stays.

 

 

 

Canada is a breath away and it takes all her power to listen to Kara.

They die because Markus was angry and they live because he was kind.

She dies because she is afraid and she lives because she is a brave little girl.

Little girls are afraid and that’s what makes them brave.

 

 

 

There are Androids and snow and humans and guns and everything spins around inside her head. She loses her mother and Luther and becomes alone among several dozen. She finds her family and she loses them.

The revolution doesn’t go their way and so that’s how she dies.

They win and she lives, clinging to whatever she can find to stay alive.

She is alone and alive. She dies and lives with her family, lives again and dies before the war is over.

She is there and she isn’t.

 

 

 

Freedom and love are just different words for different codes but they become the only codes she really care about.

 

 

 

They live and they die.

No child should ever have to be that afraid.


End file.
